Near a Thousand Tables (20 page)

Barley has some of rye's virtues, but even more flexible habits—an even wider range of ecological tolerance. It was harvested wild in substantial quantities in Syria in the twelfth millennium
B.C.;
domesticated and wild varieties have been found together in silos dating from about four thousand years later. Even early varieties proved amazingly tolerant: and barley has tended to assume huge importance as a staple for human consumption wherever conditions are too hostile for other grains. But it makes poor bread and so tends to get eaten as unground grains in soups and stews, or made into an infusion for invalids, or left as fodder. Even so, it has been the basic sustenance of great civilizations. In ancient Mesopotamia, it was more important than wheat in most people's diets. It was the original sole staple of ancient Greece, where some of the earliest Athenian coins were stamped with images of barley sheaves: not much else would grow in the thin, rocky soils that Plato compared to a skeleton's skin, penetrated by bones. Gradually, commercial integration of the Mediterranean world in antiquity made it possible for wheat, grown in vast grainlands across Egypt, Sicily and the North African littoral, to become the main food of “classical” civilization. But barley still had a role to play—a new culture area to colonize, at the eastern end of its traditional area of distribution, in the heart of Asia.

In the fifth century
A.D.,
a little understood agricultural revolution, based on barley, transformed Tibet: formerly, this isolated tableland of icy, soda-encrusted wastes was good only for nomads but once barley became available in large quantities, the advantages of a cold climate came into play. The cold protected the grains in storage. The greatness of Tibet was founded on large food surpluses. The land became a breeding ground of armies, which could march on far campaigns with “ten thousand sheep and horses in their
supply trains
.” Barley has remained a staple crop ever since, through all the centuries when Tibet's history seems to have
gone into reverse and the sometime empire became first a land of civil wars, then a victim of external aggressors. Despite the competition of other grains in modern Tibet, barley is still favored—consumed in hand-rolled balls of the toasted barley flour called tsampa, or fermented in beer.

Millet is a similarly robust type of cereal, which thrives in climates equally extreme but of the opposite character: hot and dry. It helped to make and sustain civilization in the highlands of Ethiopia, the windswept plains of the Yellow River and the fierce Sahel and savanna of West Africa, between desert and forest. Except as birdseed, or in culturally odd places, like the Vendée of northern France (where it is eaten defiantly, as a symbol of regional identity), millet has never caught on in Western civilization, perhaps because it cannot be made into leavened bread. But it is a nutritious staple, high in carbohydrates and fairly high in fat, with more protein than durum wheat. Its major role in global history was exerted via China. Conventionally, Chinese cuisine is associated with rice, but Chinese civilization would have been unthinkable without millet. Ancient songs collected in the
Shih Ching
rhapsodize on the toil of clearing weeds, brush and roots, “Why in days of old did they do this task? So that we might plant our grain, our millet, so that our millet might
be abundant
.” Pollen finds bear out this literary source. The loess lands around the Yellow River, where Chinese civilization began, were in the process of getting steadily more arid over a period of millennia; but when agriculturists began clearing them for tillage they were still a sort of savanna, where grasslands were interspersed with
trees and scrub
. The alluvial plain was still partially wooded with deciduous broadleaves. The spaces where Chinese civilization bred had environments of the kind which can work magic for men: marginal environments on the frontiers between contrasting ecosystems, where a diversity of the means of life gathers, like rich ooze in a rock pool. Agriculture started at the intersection of two long processes: the very gradual increase in aridity; the favorable diversification that followed the ice age.

Both processes were still detectable thousands of years later, in a period for which the archaeological evidence is prolific and surviving written records begin. In the second millennium
B.C.
water buffalo were plentiful: the remains of more than a thousand of them have turned up in strata of the era, together with other creatures of marsh and forest, like the elaphure and wild boar, water deer, silver pheasants and bamboo rats and even the
occasional rhinoceros
. Some of this diversity must be accounted for by the power and wealth of the Shang court and cities: they could import exotica and rich foods. The most startling example is of the trade in thousands of turtle shells, an import from the Yangtze and beyond, on which the Chinese polity absolutely depended in the second millennium
B.C.,
for
these were the most favored medium of oracular divination—bearers of messages addressed to another world: questions about the future were carved on them and the shells were then heated till they cracked. The lines of the cracks led, like wrinkles on a hand under a palmist's scrutiny, to the answers of the gods. These predictors of the future have become disclosures about the past. The evidence of a more diverse environment and a wetter climate is there, among the interpretations of the oracles, scratched by diviners on bone: protracted rains, double crops of millet and even some fields of rice. In the first millennium
B.C.
a poetess could still be surprised by love while plucking sorrel in squelchy
ground in Shansi
.

Even at its wettest, however, the Yellow River valley could not sustain a rice-eating civilization. Like other civilizations of roughly the same period and environment, China's was at first dependent on mass production of a single type of food. The legendary ancestor of the most successful lineage of the time was known as Hou Chi, “the Ruler of Millet.” In folk memory, when he first planted it,

It was heavy, it was tall,
it sprouted, it eared …
it nodded, it hung ….
Indeed the lucky grains were sent down to us,
the black millet, the double-kernelled,
millet,
pink-sprouted and white
.

The Shang dynasty, too, was identified with millet: when the palaces of the Shang era were abandoned toward the end of the second millennium
B.C.,
nostalgic visitors saw it growing
over the ruins
.

Two varieties of millet were mentioned in the earliest known Chinese writings and both have been found in archaeological deposits of the fifth millennium
B.C.
Both are almost certainly
indigenous to China
. They are robust in droughts, tolerant of alkalines. Their earliest known cultivators grew them on plots cleared by burning and ate them with the rewards of herding and hunting—domestic pigs and dogs, wild deer and fish. Astonishingly, the rudiments of this ancient way of life survive in the mountainous interior of one of the world's most heavily industrialized and technically proficient countries, Taiwan. In 1974-75, Wayne Fogg observed and recorded the techniques: a sloping site of up to sixty degrees inclination is selected because “fire burns hotter up-slope.” It is aired and sometimes dibbled before planting with seeds threshed by rubbing between hands and feet. Noisy scarecrows or magical devices—miniature wooden boats, surrounded by palms or reeds and topped with stones—are planted to ward off predators.
Each panicle is harvested by hand, tossed into a basket carried on the harvester's back and, when enough have been accumulated, they are tied in sheaves and passed from hand to hand to be collected in piles and
carried home
. Traditional poems capture moments in the cycle of the peasant's year: dibbling in the cold, hunting the raccoon, foxes and wild cats “to make furs for our lord” and, after the harvests, shooing crickets from under the bed and smoking out the big rats that prey on
the millet stocks
.

This is highly suggestive. Today, this type of agriculture is technically primitive. Yet in Shang times it could sustain what were perhaps already the densest populations in the world and keep armies of tens of thousands in the field. The best yields could be obtained only by rotation: eventually, soybeans provided the alternate crop which this system demanded, but it is not clear when—perhaps not until the mid-first millennium
B.C.,
if any store can be set by the story that Lord Huan of Ch'i first brought it home from a campaign against the Jung barbarians of
the mountains in 664
. Wheat was a latecomer always tainted with foreign origins as “one that came” or mentioned in the oracle inscriptions as the harvest of neighboring tribes to be
monitored and destroyed
.

And rice? The problems of the origin and diffusion of rice are critical for an understanding of global history. For rice provides about 20 percent of the calories and 13 percent of the proteins people consume in today's world, where it is the main staple of more than two billion people. These figures reflect the historic trajectory of rice, but perhaps do it less than full justice; for most of history—until the scientific recrafting of wheat strains to produce today's staggeringly efficient varieties—rice was
hors de pair
the world's most efficient food: with traditional varieties, one acre of rice supports, on average, 2.28 persons, compared with 1.49 per acre of wheat and 3.65 for maize. For most of history, the rice-eating civilizations of East and South Asia were more populous, more productive, more inventive, more industrialized, more fertile in technology and more formidable in war than rivals elsewhere. The wheat eaters of the West only began to emerge from relative backwardness in the last half-millennium and, by most objective standards of judgment, did not overtake India until the eighteenth century or China
until the nineteenth
.

The rise of rice in Chinese culture was the result of the gradual southward displacement of China's economic and demographic center of gravity: toward the Yangtze, to regions where rice was indigenous and cultivation extremely ancient. The northern heartlands of early Chinese civilization are too cold and dry for large-scale rice production even today, except with the help of modern agronomy. Some wild varieties grew and small plots, perhaps, were laboriously cultivated for thousands of years; but rice could not rival millet as a staple or as the focus of intensive
farming. Among the Yellow River people, rice was recognized as an item in a civilized larder but not grown in large amounts. As with every aspect of the early history of civilization in what is now the Chinese culture area, the origins of rice production are being pushed ever further back in time by new archaeological discoveries. Rice cultivation was practiced at least eight thousand years ago behind receding floodwaters of lakes around the middle and low Yangtze. By about five thousand years ago, “dry,” rain-watered upland rice was grown on the southern margins of northern China. Unequivocal evidence coming from Shen-hsi, in the form of outlines of rice grains imprinted on pottery fragments, exists for the sixth millennium
B.C.
Although claims have been made for various sites in Southeast Asia and what are now India and Pakistan as the original homelands of rice farming, no conclusive evidence from any of those areas dates from before the
third millennium
B.C.

Meanwhile, rice became a symbol of abundance and a mainstay of the menu in a process inseparable from the making of China—a process of expansion and acculturation which fused two contrasting environments. Ancient Chinese ethnography was not based on reliable fieldwork but it was at least clear what barbarians were like: in every respect, they were mirror opposites of Chinese, They lived in caves,
wore skins
. They did not include people of intelligible or kindred speech. And they did not include rice growers, like the people who preceded northern colonists on the Yangtze at Ch'ing-lien-kang. The rice growers' world was the seductive frontier of the second millennium
B.C.,
sucking settlers southward to the expanding limits of civilization, luring barbarians in, melding the natives and the newcomers into Chinese.

Crudely beheld, in what we think of as the Middle Ages, the farming cultures of Eurasia and Africa could be characterized as a patchwork of staples: rice in the east, barley in part of central Asia, wheat in the west and millet and rye around some unfavored edges. The New World, by contrast, despite the enormous diversity of the cultures it enclosed, was unified—as far as farming was concerned—by the near omnipresence of maize. To an inexpert eye, there seems little resemblance between maize and its closest relatives among surviving wild grasses. Presumably, it derived from varieties now lost, but the original feral plants certainly had no more than a single row of ill-adhering seeds. The transformation, which produced the characteristic fat cobs of the great Native American civilizations, with many rows of grains, was one of the triumphs of early agronomy. There is no evolutionary reason why maize might have acquired such a structure. It came about as the result of purposeful selection and—probably—hybridization by cultivators.

When the process started is hard to say but multikernel specimens survive entire in central Mexican sites from the mid-fourth millennium
B.C.
Fragmentary
evidence dates from at least a thousand years earlier in both central Mexican and southern Peruvian sites. Processing, as well as production, demanded scientific flair, because without proper preparation, maize is a nutritionally deficient food, low in both two vital amino acids—lysine and tryptophan—but also in the B vitamin niacin, a lack of which causes the disease pellagra. One way of obverting this danger is to ensure that maize eaters get plenty of varied supplementary foods, and indeed, squash and beans generally formed with maize a “trinity” of divine plant foods wherever it was possible to provide all three in combination. The bottle gourd, the earliest known form of cultivated squash, was being pickled in Tamaulipas in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, and in Oaxaca (at the highly productive archaeological site of Tehuacán), as well as north of Lima in northern Peru and the Ayacucho basin, long before the earliest evidence of
maize cultivation
. A balanced diet, however, must have been a luxury in the most densely populated parts of ancient America. To ensure the health of the huge populations who depended on it, maize had to be soaked when the grains were ripe, and cooked with lime or wood ash, removing the transparent skin, releasing the otherwise absent amino acids and enhancing the protein value. Archaeological evidence of equipment for this process has been found on the southern coast of what is now Guatemala in sites from the mid- to late
second millennium
B.C.